Hidden London: The Seven Noses of Soho

What’s in a nose? Rather, what does the nose represent?

In 1997, noses embodied Big Brother society, at least as far as the artist Rick Buckley was concerned.

In a protest against the emerging surveillance state of the 1990s, Buckley made 35 plaster-of-paris casts of his own hooter and attached them to walls around London. Each one arrived in opposition to the proliferation of CCTV cameras at a time when the Home Office was spending about 78 per cent of its crime-prevention budget on the technology.

The Seven Noses of Soho

Jason McCombie

And so arrived noses on important public buildings: one appeared outside the National Gallery; another popped up at Tate Britain.

You see, Buckley installed his guerrilla sculptures right “under the nose” of the authorities. At the time, he didn’t publicise his project at all. And he painted the casts to match the walls they were fixed to.

His aim was to see whether he could install his pieces undetected and have them become part of the buildings themselves.

A strong whiff of mystery

They appeared mysteriously — nobody knew who was behind them, until 2011, when The Standard uncloaked the artist — and many were immediately removed. Stolen? Possibly.

Or maybe the powers-that-be discovered Buckley’s flagrant disregard for bricks and mortar and failed to see the funny side, as is so often the case.

Nevertheless, today seven noses remain, or so it’s said. Five are reportedly in Soho, from D’Arblay Street to Bateman Street, perched among the drinkers in the city’s maddest square mile.

There are two outside Soho — on Endell Street in Covent Garden, and within Admiralty Arch. But “the Seven Noses of Soho” moniker was created anyway, and has stuck, and fair enough. Soho is home to mystery, to art. Many noses have fallen in its quarter over the years. These ones endure.

Back in 2012, Buckley, from Hackney, explained his work to The Standard: “At the time there was this debate about the number of CCTV cameras. A lot of people took offence to it. They saw it as an infringement of their liberty. I was reading about the Situationists.

“Buckley boasts a pleasing nose: it’s neither too big, nor too small”

“They were artists and writers who did these sporadic, illegal actions. I guess you would call it performance art today. That inspired me as well. I wanted to see if I could get away with it without being detected. The afterthought was that it would be great if these protrusions would become part of the structure themselves.”

It stands to reason that much of the curiosity has been lost almost 30 years later, but the noses are still a point of analogue, architectural eccentricity in our modern city, one shaped more by AI and self-driving cars than whimsical takes on broad topics. The noses now exist mostly unnoticed: London is busy and frenetic and who has time to stop and look up?

Myths and stories about the artworks live on. One of the final seven is not a Buckley nose, for example. There’s a legend that suggests that if anybody finds all seven, they will become roaringly wealthy — art, or more pressingly, admiration thereof, can bring fortune.

Another story states that architects used to “stamp” their buildings with a cast of their noses, a sort of nostril-led signature to signify expertise (if only — these days the steel and glass buildings of London all look much the same close up, even if some of the city’s latest skyscrapers are impressively tall, shapely and shiny from afar).

Historical hooters

For a long while, speculative types suggested the nose close to Trafalgar Square was a replica of Napoleon’s snout for passing cavalrymen to tweak.

Another rumour states the schnoz is a replica of the Admiral Lord Nelson’s — a gentleman famous for possessing a notably large one as much as for his maritime nous — acting as a potential replacement were his own to be damaged while he was raised all the way up to the top of his famous column.

Sadly untrue, of course (the dates don’t add up, even nearly), though who’s to say the nose won’t one day be put to practical use? Nelson’s column was erected in 1843 and must be suffering wear and tear.

Getty Images

In my own experience, I’m not convinced there are seven noses left — I think one or two have gone missing, removed by some drunk fool intent on taking some of London home with them or by an enterprising plastic surgeon.

Buckley boasts a pleasing nose: it’s neither too big, nor too small; it has a little ridge, the sort that elevates a face rather than takes it over. To that end, were I looking to improve my own, a flight to Turkey booked, I might take one of the Soho noses with me as a ready-made example of what I desire.

Beyond speculation, the noses have lost much of their early significance. Buckley’s nasal-based intervention was largely ineffective. Besides previous governmental attempts to introduce ID cards, there hasn’t been much mainstream rebuttal when it comes to CCTV, has there?

As a society, public privacy was lost years ago, and cameras in streets are the least of our worries today. If anything, people are more eager than ever to tell the world where they are and what they’re doing. Although Buckley himself doesn’t appear to be on Instagram, which spares us some low-level irony.

The noses are worth sniffing out regardless. The body part has a powerful idiomatic role in Britain, one that holds weight, and if nothing else, the collection stands as a wonderfully weird gallery, free to peruse between pints. Does it matter if they mean nothing at all? Well, who nose?